A dead-easy guide to keeping your PC up to date

Keeping your PC up to date with the latest security patches is a necessity and a burden at the same time. While you need to patch it up to protect it from attacks using known exploits to sneak past your PC's defense, it at the same time means that you will spend time finding out about updates, downloading them and deploying them on your system.

So what's the best way to do so? Best in this case means spending as little time as possible but still being safe when you connect to the Internet.

The first thing that you may want to do is prioritize as patching the operating system itself or Notepad should not have the same priorities. Here is the top list of priorities:

Operating system - This is the first priority. Make sure you always install the latest security patches when they become available.

Software that interacts with remote servers - This includes web browsers, email clients, browser plugins, news readers, ftp clients and other programs that you use to connect to remote servers.

The rest - Software that you only use locally.

1. The operating system

The best way to handle operating system updates is to configure automatic updates in Windows. The operating system by default has automatic updates enabled. To verify that this is the case open the control panel with a click on start and the selection of the item in the start menu. Windows 8 users can tap on Windows and enter Control Panel to open it this way or enter Automatic Updates instead, switch to Settings on the right and select the Turn automatic updating on or off from there.

Here you need to click on System and Security and there on turn automatic updating on or off which leads to the following screen.

Windows XP users click on Automatic Updates right on the first page of the control panel.

The recommended setting is to install updates automatically. This should work for most users of the Windows operating system but not for those who want more control over the process. You can switch from installing important updates automatically to downloading but not installing, or only notifying you about them to give you the option to download them manually instead.

Suggestion 1: Set Windows to install updates automatically

Suggestion 2: Have Windows download patches and notify you about them at least

2. Software that connects to remote servers

There are thousands of programs out there that you can use to connect to remote servers or that do that on their own. It is impossible to provide you with instructions to configure all of them. You can however separate programs in high and low priority targets.

High priority targets are web browsers, web browser plugins and applications that are popular.

Most web browsers support automatic updates so that you do not need to do anything at all if you have configured the programs to be updated automatically when it comes to browsers. Here is a short checklist to verify the update state of your browser of choice:

Internet Explorer - Gets updated via Windows Update

Mozilla Firefox - Tap on the alt-key on the keyboard and select Tools > Options. Click on the advanced tab in the new window and there on the update tab. Check if Firefox is set to "automatically install updates".

Google Chrome - The browser is configured to automatically update the system by default. There is no setting in the browser to disable the updating. You do have options to disable the updating though like disabling the Google Update plugin, service, or the task in the Windows Task Scheduler.

Opera - Click on the Opera button and select Settings > Preferences from the options. Click on the Advanced tab and there on Security on the left. Locate the Auto-update entry at the bottom and make sure it is set to automatically install updates.

If you do not want the installed browser to update manually I suggest you subscribe to the following feeds to receive notifications when browser updates are available:

Browser plugins need to be updated separately from browsers. My first suggestion would be to take a look at the plugin listing to see if you find plugins listed here that you do not need. Firefox and Opera users can enter about:plugins, Chrome users chrome://plugins for a list of installed plugins.

I suggest you disable all plugins that you do not use. A good way to start would be to disable all of them to see if you notice any issues while browsing the web. Once you come upon sites that do not work anymore, start to enable the plugins needed to use those sites again.

Two plugins have been high profile targets in the past:

Oracle Java - Has an automatic update feature built-in

Adobe Flash Player - Also features automatic updates.

I suggest you subscribe to the following blogs to receive notifications about updates:

Use a similar approach for other programs and plugins that you work with. Check out if they offer automatic updates and subscribe to the company feed to receive notifications about updates when they are released.

3. Other programs, general tips

The easiest way to take care of the majority of programs you have installed on your system is to install a program that scans your system regularly for outdated software. This most of the time includes plugin and browser checks, and sometimes even checks if all the latest Windows patches are installed.

Here is a small selection of programs that you can use to scan your system for outdated software and missing updates:

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

I second PatchMyPC. I install it on all my clients’ PCs and recommend to them that they run it weekly or so. It updates the most critical software and allows for updating quite a few other common programs. The only problem it seems to have is that it usually reports Google Chrome updates as having failed – but it still appears to update it.

hi martin, you are always timely with your “stuff”…thanks. i take a slightly more conservative approach to updates. first, i always run sandboxed so i am pretty safe. i like to wait maybe a week after updates to see it there is an uproar from users. sometimes updates just dont work like they are supposed to. this latest java a case in point. my system would just not work correctly with streaming quotes with the new update. i ended up going back to an older java and no problem. they will work it out and then i will update. i like to rely on sandboxie for a lot of protection.

It is obviously best to test updates before you install them on a system you work with. The big issue here is that the system remains vulnerable during that time unless it is possible to mitigate the issue for instance.

I just checked the latest Sumo download on Virustotal and it is showing 0/46 hits. Malwarebytes is one of the engines and it too is return a clean result. I also checked with an installed version of Malwarebytes and it too did not find anything in the file.

Where did you download your version from, can you get me a direct link or page please?

I just checked again and MalwareBytes Pro let me connect to Sumo’s site and VirusTotal noted that sumo.exe is clean. I guess we’ll never know if those were false positives or the site was temporarily infected.

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.